Cape Cod man's record collection now part of Library of Congress

John Basile jbasile@wickedlocal.com @jbasileRegister

Thursday

May 17, 2018 at 10:01 AMMay 17, 2018 at 10:02 AM

Chip Bishop was like a lot of American kids who grew up in the 1950s and '60s; he had a thing for rock 'n roll. But unlike a lot of American kids he didn't just consume the hits of the day and move on. He collected records, lots of them, and he treasured them. The records and the music on them were an important part of his life and, now, even though he has died, his collection lives on at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Bishop, who lived much of his life in Dennis with his wife Jane Nichols Bishop and their family, died at age 71 in 2016. The year before he died, however, he donated his collection to the Library of Congress. In the thousands of 45 RPM records he owned can be found the sound of a generation.

"It's always a pleasure to meet and work with someone like Chip who above all was a fan of the music. He had a passion," said Matt Barton, Curator of the Recorded Sound Section at the Library of Congress.

"The collection is truly a curated one. It definitely reflected his time and his era. There are a lot of things that were only hits in the Boston and new England area, and that makes them much harder to find. They were a huge part of what was going on in pop music at that time," Barton said.

Jane Nichols Bishop said Chip made the donation before he was diagnosed with the cancer that would cause his death, and he was thrilled that the collection would have an appropriate home.

"He had been collecting since he was eight or 10 years old. He was a very serious record collector," she said.

Chip Bishop's first job was in a record store in his hometown of Woonsockett, Rhode Island. He ran errands for the store owner in exchange for records. Chip even ran his own (unlicensed) neighborhood radio station for a while before agents from the FCC visited and shut it down. When he was 15, he began hanging around at WWON in Rhode Island, and, as he said in a 2008 interview, that was a major boost for his collection, as the manager gave him the records the station wasn't going to play.

"They were an adult music station and they weren't going to play Little Richard, Fats Domino and Elvis so he gave me the records," Bishop said in the 2008 interview.

Bishop went to work for WBZ radio in Boston, where he was part of the team of reporters that covered the Beatles arrival in the United States. One prized collectable from that era is his press pass from a Beatles concert. Bishop went on to work as Director of Hospital Information at Woonsockett Hospital in Rhode Island and became the youngest elected member of the Woonsockett City Council. He later worked on Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign (and met Jane Nichols, who would become his wife, in Maine during Carter's reelection campaign), worked as the congressional liaison for the Amtrak Northeast Corridor Project and worked in the office of Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and as a lobbyist for the American Public Transit Association. Later, the Bishops moved to Dennis where they created a public relations and marketing company and ran the Olde Wisteria House bed and breakfast and founded Peak Season Workforce, an H2B staffing company. Later, Chip wrote three books about members of the Roosevelt family, the final one completed shortly before his death.

One aspect of Bishop's collection that makes it important is the many picture sleeves he collected. It turns out that often the picture sleeve is scarcer than the record it enclosed, because so few of the sleeves survived. Imagine teenage girls pinning up the sleeves of records by their favorite singers on their bedroom walls, or teen boys pasting sleeves with pictures of their favorite bands in their school lockers.

After Chip contact the Library of Congress about donating his collection, Barton went to the Bishops' Mashpee home, where they had moved from Dennis, to see the collection. And he was impressed. A deal was made and when the time came, the collection was boxed and shipped to D.C.

"We bought boxes to put inside the boxes," Jane Nichols Bishop recalled. "They were carefully labeled and packed up. It was a couple of days work."

She said it was a comfort to her husband, after he became ill, that his prized collection was going to be properly taken care of.

Now it is being catalogued and made available for scholars, researchers and the public to use.

"The collection is here for people to study and learn from," Barton said. "If you come in, there a good chance you will be listening to one of Chip's records."